The Sexes

November 21, 2014

New York City is becoming (in)famous for no’s. No smoking, no bake sales, no salt, no French fries, no large sodas, no butter in schools, no non-girly toy guns. And now we can add a new no-no to the list:

No “man-spreading.”

This refers to the habit some men have of sitting with their legs splayed out on city subways. And now the Metropolitan Transit Authority is launching a PSA shaming campaign — funded with tax money — to try to eliminate this widening problem.

This effort is accompanied by the usual leftist-values-laden, politically correct indignation. Writing at Time magazine on Wednesday, Brian Moylan opens with an obligatory misandrist line about how there “are lots of things that men do that are crazy” before calling man-spreading “the most visual manifestation of patriarchal privilege” and opining that this “is why it is especially angering.”

November 03, 2014

“And that’s not a choice we want Americans to make.” So said pro-choice president Barack Obama, speaking Friday on women and the economy at Rhode Island College in Providence. And some would say his remark was anything but providential, as the choice he referenced was that of mothers staying at home with their children.

To place Obama’s remark in context, he was advocating increased government pre-school so women could remain in the workforce and said:

October 13, 2014

They used to say “Stay in school, boys and girls.” But if kids do so now, they may not be “boys and girls” — that is, not if some social engineers get their way.

In a shocking and disturbing example of political correctness, newly uncovered middle-school training documents in Lincoln, Nebraska, counsel teachers to avoid “gendered expressions” as part of an effort to alter the traditional understanding that mankind is divided into two sexes. The materials, revealed by Nebraska Watchdog, advise teachers not to call “students ‘boys and girls’ or ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ but to instead use more generic expressions like campers, readers, athletes or even purple penguins to be more ‘gender inclusive,’” reports the organization at its website. The social-engineering documents are entitled “12 easy steps on the way to gender inclusiveness...” and state:

September 30, 2014

In a recent address to a United Nations education event, First Lady Michelle Obama decided to shine the light on a certain nation’s treatment of women. No, it wasn’t Saudi Arabia where females aren’t allowed to drive, or the Congo where rape is brutal and systematic. It was the United States.

Here’s the relevant portion of the First Lady’s speech of September 24: “[W]omen here are still woefully underrepresented in our government and in the senior ranks of our corporations. We still struggle with violence against women and harmful cultural norms that tell women how they’re supposed to look and act.”

Now, it’s not just that singling out the United States for such criticism in our rough-hewn world is a bit like maligning a neighbor who wouldn’t buy his wife a new mink while ignoring the wife-beater across the street; it’s that, critics might point out, what’s explicit and implicit in M. Obama’s criticism is very much the opposite of the truth.

September 24, 2014

It long ago became clear to me that, despite all the pretense, protesting and politicking, no one who has ever seriously thought about equality actually believes in it. When making this case, one could point to how Eric Holder’s DOJ is currently suing the Pennsylvania State Police for treating women equally (how dare they!), but there’s perhaps no better example than a recent BBC writer who asks, “Is sport sexist?”

The author, Aimee Lewis, poses the question because there are still sports where the women’s categories don’t precisely correspond to the men’s; for example, she mentions how women gymnasts and swimmers don’t always compete in the same kinds of events, the no-contact rule in women’s lacrosse and how in tennis, “While men play five sets at Grand Slams, women can only compete over three sets.”

Now, the last example well illustrates the convoluted thinking underpinning much of the equality movement. Is the correct way of framing this that “women can only compete over three sets”?

September 12, 2014

If you thought discriminating against women could get you in trouble today, try treating them equally.

The Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) is learning this the hard way. The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit in late July to end the PSP’s practice of requiring that all state-police applicants, be they male or female, pass the same exact physical fitness test to be admitted for cadet training. Now it has been announced that the PSP will challenge the federal lawsuit, with State Police Commissioner Frank Noonan saying that dumbing down the standards “would be insulting to those men and women who already strove to achieve those standards.... We should not be bullied into lowering our standards for any applicants.”

The DOJ’s problem, it appears, with the PSP’s equality of opportunity is that it doesn’t create equality of outcome, as female applicants fail the physical test at higher rates than do their male counterparts. This inspired the Obama administration to launch an investigation of the PSP in 2009 and then file its lawsuit on July 29 of this year. CNSNews.com’s Susan Jones provided more detail at the time, writing:

August 30, 2014

Polygamy may still be illegal in most of the West, but, increasingly, marriages today often include more than just two members: husband, wife — and Big Brother. The latest example is a proposal in the United Kingdom that would make actions such as “bullying” and withholding money in intimate relationships jailable offenses. Writes the Telegraph’sDavid Barrett:

Husbands who keep their wives downtrodden could face prison under new plans set out by the Government today.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, published proposals for a new offence of “domestic abuse” that would criminalise men or women who bully, cause psychological harm or deny money to their partners.

The law would make the worst cases of non-violent “controlling behaviour” a jailable offence.

Exact terms of the offence are yet to be defined, but it could involve humiliating, frightening or intimidating a partner, keeping them away from friends or family or restricting their access to money.

April 14, 2014

If a famine befell us and you couldn’t save everyone, would you withhold the food you had and let every citizen starve rather than endure the inequality of just saving some? If recent history is any guide, certain leftists just might say yes.

A good example of this phenomenon involved a multiple sclerosis patient in Gothenburg, Sweden, who was denied a more effective and expensive medication — even though he was willing to pay for it — because, wrote columnist Walter Williams in 2009, “bureaucrats said it would set a bad precedent and lead to unequal access to medicine.” No wonder Winston Churchill said that socialism’s “inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

And another example just reared its ugly head in Plymouth, Michigan, where the locality’s high school is tearing down newly constructed bleachers in deference to the equality police. MyFoxDetroit.com reports on the issue, writing:

A new set of seating is being torn down outside the Plymouth Wildcats varsity boys' baseball field, not long before the season begins, because the fields for boys' and girls' athletics must be equal.

A group of parents raised money for a raised seating deck by the field, as it was hard to see the games through a chain-link fence. The parents even did the installation themselves, and also paid for a new scoreboard.

So what happened? Some unnamed malcontent lodged a complaint with the feral government, at which point U.S Education Department Office for Civil Rights overlords decreed that the seating must go. Ain’t equality grand?

February 20, 2014

A market economy is absolutely the worst system in the world — except for all the rest. This isn’t just a play on Winston Churchill’s quip about democracy, it’s also true. Pity that we have to rely on those vice-ridden, flighty creatures called human beings to make decisions about what products and services we’ll enjoy. The only thing worse is having those decisions made by the subset of human beings called bureaucrats or politicians.

“Study: Hollywood execs have own 'war on women,' choking off major roles, salary from women,” reads the headline at Washington Examiner. At issue is a new report by the Women’s Media Center (WMC) — arch-feminista Gloria Steinem’s group — showing that in terms of warm-body count and amount of cold cash, women lag behind men in all corners of media and entertainment. We’re to find these data troubling and, as Time magazine wrote in a headline, “depressing.” In perhaps some comic relief, Time followed that note with the subtitle, “Jennifer Lawrence makes $11 million less than Adam Sandler.” Yeah, hey, pass the Prozac.

I don’t know, is it depressing that men do more dangerous jobs and suffer vastly more work-related injuries and deaths? Is it depressing that the whole workaday world, so unjustly dominated by men, was created by them in the first place? Is every difference among demographics that doesn’t happen to benefit “victim” groups to be thought depressing?